Abstract
Residents of marginalised urban settlements in low- and middle-income countries jointly experience multiple short-term basic service deficits which impair their health and broader wellbeing. A wide range of bottom-up strategies has been identified and employed to enhance basic service access in these contexts, but few scholars have attempted to conceptually organise these strategies. This study synthesises the disparate means identified in the literature to effect jointly experienced basic service access enhancements. It draws on fieldwork conducted in four notified slums situated in Hyderabad, India, to create a typology of the full range of strategies employed by collectively organised residents, illustrate how strategies interact in practice, and suggest a prioritisation of strategies with reference to the extent of pressure they exert on the local urban state to improve service provision over time. The study finds that high-pressure strategies which alter the incentives of public agencies and align them with those of residents appear the most promising to mediate the tension between short-term and long-term service needs.
Introduction
Marginalised urban residents in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) suffer from a range of basic service deficits which diminish their day-to-day health and broader wellbeing. Responsibility for these deficits is most often attributed to the incompetence or neglect of the urban local body, local basic service line agencies or state-authorised service providers, or local politicians, each of which are either insulated from or unresponsive to top-down pressure (Nijman, 2008). In the absence of effective public provision of basic service enhancements by local agencies, a wide range of bottom-up strategies have been both identified by scholars and employed by affected residents. Most studies, however, fall short of analysing the empirical complexity of response strategies on at least one of three fronts. First, they fail to recognise that service deficiencies are experienced and most effectively addressed at a collective scale; basic service deficiencies in dense urban settlements are rarely limited to single or small groups of households. Yet few scholars have attempted to enumerate and analyse the full range of tactics that lead to collective basic service upgrading. Second, many studies focus on strategies for single-service enhancements (such as improved tap drinking water coverage), whereas collective groups of residents often experience and work to address multiple – albeit simultaneous and related – service gaps. Finally, nearly all existing studies have either demonstrated the effectiveness of a range of strategies employed via collectively organised groups to address a single service need (McGranahan, 2013; McGranahan and Mitlin, 2016) or documented the effectiveness of a single or limited strategy set to address multiple service needs (Appadurai, 2001; Patel et al., 2001). Mitlin (2006) notes the multiplicity of strategies likely to be employed by urban social movements focused on basic service enhancements, but few other studies have explicitly compared and assessed the effectiveness of the full range of available strategies employed by collectively organised groups. By contrast, this study draws on fieldwork conducted in four slums situated in Hyderabad, India, as well as studies identified from multiple literatures to build a synthetic typology demonstrating how collectively organised groups effect multiple basic service enhancements.
The first section of the study critically reviews existing research on household and collective bottom-up efforts to secure basic service enhancements in marginalised settlements. The second section describes the context for the empirical findings derived from fieldwork in four notified slums in Hyderabad, India, including published, related studies by the author. It also outlines data and methods employed in the study. The third section of the study then draws on the fieldwork to create a typology of strategies employed by collectively organised groups and provides examples of how strategies interact in practice. It also proposes a prioritisation of collective strategies with reference to the timeliness and sufficiency of response they elicit from the local urban state or its authorised service providers to enhance service access in the medium to long term. Within this category of strategies, this study highlights several under-studied, high-pressure tactics which are prominent in the collective efforts of Hyderabad’s slum residents through the Basti Vikas Manch platform and have applicability to other marginalised settlement contexts. These strategies include the use of media outlets and the maintenance of written archives of grievance filings with public agencies. The fourth section of the study situates the empirical findings in relation to existing literature, and the conclusion provides future direction for research and advocacy.
Collective bottom-up efforts to effect basic service enhancements
When local public-sector agencies provide sufficient basic services, there is no need for residents of marginalised settlements to employ alternative means of ensuring service access. Local state provision is a best-case scenario for residents, as the public sector is more durable than most if not all alternative service providers (Grindle, 2004). Accordingly, it is important to acknowledge that top-down, endogenous local state reform remains the most sustainable means for residents of marginalised settlements to secure collective basic service security.
As much of the literature on accountability and participation asserts, however, and de Wit et al. succinctly summarise, ‘decentralization is hardly ever successful if merely implemented from the top by the state’ (2008: 80). While ‘top-down’ efforts may effect change, a high degree of participation and input by community members from the ‘bottom-up’ is essential for collective service upgrading to meet local needs (Narayanan et al., 2017). In contexts where the local state is either not experiencing top-down pressure, is unresponsive to pressure or where reforms are not occurring quickly enough to address collective basic service needs, bottom-up efforts by residents are necessary to secure basic service enhancements.
Much of the literature on bottom-up means to enhance basic service access in slums, whether household or collective, has emphasised approaches which directly bypass the state or engage it only defensively (Bayat, 2000). Means to improve service access which bypass the state include reliance on private companies, NGO service provision, social business models or self-reliance through direct service production. These strategies do not engage or even necessarily acknowledge the role of the local state as responsible for basic service provision, and thus place no or low pressure on it to reform.
The recognised limits of private providers, NGOs and self-provision to meet multiple collective service needs, however, highlight the need for collective action to pressure the local state to enhance service provision. For instance, Lee finds that engagement with intermediary institutions external to low-income urban communities is usually necessary to bring about collective improvements in service provision and is evident even in most of the successful efforts labelled as bottom-up (Lee, 1998). The ultimate goal of all engagement, whether cooperative or adversarial, is to increasingly incentivise government officials and politicians to provide better services to slum residents (Allaby and Preston, 2005). As Joshi (2013) argues, pressure mechanisms that can trigger strong sanctions are more likely to improve service responsiveness by providers.
This study classifies strategies along a pressure continuum, from low-pressure strategies making it more convenient, to moderate-pressure strategies making it more politically expedient, to high-pressure strategies making it politically or legally necessary for the local state to enhance services. Bottom-up strategies which engage the state can also be classified as either indirect or direct. This study defines indirect strategies as engaging with a non-service-providing public official or institution (e.g. ward councillor, court, the media), which in turn can exert either moderate or high pressure on the agency or official who can bring about the desired service enhancement. Direct strategies are defined as those engaging with the official or agency which can directly undertake the desired service enhancement and are inherently high-pressure.
Moreover, bottom-up strategies employed by residents of marginalised settlements are more likely to effect long-term service enhancements if employed via collective action, as demonstrated in a companion study (Pierce, 2017a). The term ‘collective action’ is used by scholars variously to describe the efforts of groups (ranging in size from a few households on a block to millions) to engage in coordinated efforts to obtain a common goal. This study employs the term ‘collective action’ to identify the coordinated activities of the supra-household groups organised by the Basti Vikas Manch (BVM), but also stresses and illustrates the complexity of how a single collective platform such as the BVM evolves to advance claims around multiple, simultaneously experienced basic service deficits via a range of ‘actions’.
Existing studies that are focused on service enhancement strategies available to marginalised but organised groups have demonstrated the effectiveness of a range of strategies employed via collective organisation to address a single service need, particularly sanitation access (McGranahan, 2013; McGranahan and Mitlin, 2016). On the other hand, other studies have illustrated the effectiveness of collectively organised groups employing a limited set of strategies (or a single approach) to address multiple service needs (Appadurai, 2001; Gopakumar, 2014; Patel et al., 2001). Mitlin (2006), however, notes the ‘multitude of strategies’ likely to be employed by urban social movements focused on basic service enhancements, which are most comparable to the collectively organised groups in the study areas.
Moderate-pressure strategies: Engaging the state on its own terms
While a group of strategies discussed above completely bypasses the local state and thus applies no or little pressure on local agencies to improve collective service access for marginalised settlements, a second set of approaches engage the state on its own terms. These strategies attempt to hold individual politicians or bureaucrats accountable for service delivery performance standards that they have agreed to but exert only low to moderate levels of pressure on the structure of local government service delivery itself to undertake significant reform; thus, these strategies are, by definition, indirect. The most common indirect pressure strategies employed by collective groups are service co-production with public agencies and voting in local government elections on the basis of service delivery performance.
Co-production
Urban co-production occurs when neighbourhoods or community-based groups materially assist a local government agency in providing basic services (Levine, 1984). Participation by residents in co-production suggests both a basic belief in local government intentions and a recognition of its limitations to ensure access. Residents volunteer their time and resources to carry out part of the local government’s remit and thus reduce the demands for service delivery from the state (Hasan, 2008; Joshi and Moore, 2004). Isham and Kakkonen (1998) express scepticism regarding co-production’s effectiveness because of the high time commitments required of community members. Further, the success of co-production remains dependent on the quality of public service institutions, without yielding transformations in their capacities or incentives.
Local voting
Groups of urban residents in countries which hold free and fair elections may also use their ability to vote to hold candidates for public office accountable for a track record on basic service delivery to the settlement which falls under the politician’s influence. In practice, however, residents of marginalised settlements often find it difficult to collectively hold elected officials responsible. This difficulty is due in part to the inaccessibility of data on public official performance, and the blame-shifting of politicians regarding service access deficits onto non-elected bureaucrats (Besley, 2006). Moreover, since basic service access is one of many pressing dimensions which residents must factor into their local voting choices, the general lack of correlation between local voting choices and basic service outcomes is unsurprising (Moreno-Jaimes, 2007).
Study contribution
As highlighted in the introduction, this study contributes to the literature in several ways. Rather than focusing on standalone strategies or services, this study synthesises the full range of tactics which can be used for collective basic service upgrading. It also analyses the effectiveness of their application to address the full range of service gaps experienced in marginalised settlements. Moreover, this study demonstrates how strategies can be and are sequenced by collective groups to place increasing pressure on the local state to provide enhanced service provision over the long term.
The fieldwork context: Hyderabad and the Basti Vikas Manch
Fieldwork for this study was conducted by the author under the umbrella of a capacity-building programme, the ‘Citizen First Campaign for Water Supply and Sanitation Accountability’ initially funded by the UK-based charity WaterAid. The programme started in 2010 to support the efforts of residents of three large notified slums located within 20 km of each other in the Secunderabad–Hyderabad twin city region – Addagutta, Bholakpur and Rasoolpura – to improve their drinking water quality. Each settlement houses between 40,000 and 60,000 residents within 15–20 self-identified neighbourhoods. A smaller fourth settlement, Ambedkar Nagar, joined the effort in 2014. The informal establishment of each of the four study settlements pre-dates 1970, since which time each has obtained official status as a ‘notified’ slum recognised by the national government. Each of the areas features a permanent built environment, and publicly subsidised infrastructure segments. Potential obstacles to service access stemming from the illegality, government clearance or non-recognition of settlements (Mitlin, 2006) are thus not a major concern. Rather than the complete absence of the public sector, the slow and uneven pace of service improvements relative to needs was the impetus for collective employment of strategies to change the status quo.
The BVM effort can only be understood as a product of relatively recent top-down government accountability reforms in India, as well as decades of bottom-up and intermediary slum upgrading programmes in Hyderabad specifically (see related study by Pierce, 2016, for more detail). Gaps in service access to which the BVM responded partly reflect factors largely outside of local public service providers’ control, such as rapid population growth in Hyderabad (Hyderabad City Development Plan, n.d.), systematic underfunding of urban local bodies, and other symptoms of the post-colonial state in India (Chaplin, 2011). However, bottom-up efforts also emerge because of the failures of co-opted top-down experiments in decentralised urban governance (de Wit et al., 2008) and the strategic use of decentralisation and empowerment language by the local state to devolve responsibility for service provision to the private sector and local communities (Nijman, 2008).
The more proximate impetus for the citizen’s campaign was a water contamination tragedy experienced by residents in the Bholakpur settlement. In 2009, the water and sewerage lines of the Hyderabad Metropolitan Water Supply and Sewerage Board (HMWSSB), the urban local body’s water agency, were crossed and publicly-provided water running to the slum was polluted with E. coli. Consumption of this water led to the deaths of at least 14 settlement residents, as well as hundreds of cases of serious illness (Iftekhar, 2011; Times of India, 2010). This failure of public service provision mobilised residents to demand better services and compelled local government agencies and NGOs to pay greater heed to residents’ concerns.
The Hyderabad-based NGO Joint Action for Water oversaw the first phase of a programme (2010–2013) to enhance residents’ awareness of and more vigilant government testing of water quality in the slums. The second phase of the programme (2013–2016), supported by two separate Hyderabad-based NGOs, the South Asian Consortium for Integrated Water Resources (SaciWATERs) and the Society for Participatory Development (SPD), helped to establish, or in their words, ‘activate’, the BVM (‘Slum Development Platform’) as a collective action platform to address a wider set of basic service issues experienced by residents. While dependence on external assistance has decreased substantially in the second and third phases of the programme, a separate study by the author asserts that complete independence has neither been obtainable or necessarily desirable in the short term (Pierce, 2016).
Involvement in BVM activities does not require membership, dues or any other prerequisites. The core collective activity of the BVM takes place in regular neighbourhood-level meetings, which typically involve individuals from 10 to 15 households (Pierce, 2017a). As Mancur Olson first suggested, effective collective action is much more plausible in observable groups such as these neighbourhood meetings. The BVM solicits a broad range of participation from residents, and has demonstrated substantial, albeit imperfect inclusion of concerns across gender, caste and political lines. In 2014, across the three large study areas, about 12% of households routinely attended these weekly meetings (Pierce, 2017a). As described throughout this study, concerns regarding basic service access raised at these meetings are then represented to the urban local body, its authorised service providers or scaled up to a slum-level BVM committee. Further analysis of the organisation, internal power dynamics and activities of the BVM can be found in companion studies by the author (Pierce, 2016; Pierce, 2017a).
Data and methods
To carry out this study, the author collected primary data via fieldwork in Hyderabad, India, in 2013–2014. Over this time, and in conjunction with SaciWATERs staff, multiple visits were made to each of the study areas, including transect walks and attendance at sub-slum, slum-wide and all-slum meetings of the BVM. To describe the history and current status of basic service access, this study also relies on programme data and media files maintained by local BVM groups and SaciWATERs project staff, over the period 2010–2014. To corroborate observations and analysis of primary programme documents, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 26 local stakeholders. Individuals interviewed included all SaciWATERs staff and SPD staff (5), BVM conveners in each informal settlement (4), locality leaders in each sub-slum community (9), female non-leader, slum residents (5) and representatives from other NGOs and government officials (3).
In addition, to build a synthetic understanding of how collectively organised groups effect basic service enhancements, the conceptual literature on urban household strategies to secure basic services was extensively reviewed and synthesised. This study also identified a range of empirical studies from a variety of disciplines which conceptually or empirically assess standalone strategies to improve collective service access in marginalised settlements. For both the conceptual and empirical literatures, the author first manually identified and reviewed studies to identify the key themes of the study’s typology, and then further used keyword search terms in the online WorldCat database to conduct a systematic review to ensure more robust inclusion of relevant literature. The bulk of relevant studies identified were derived from the urban planning, policy, geography, development, economics and political science disciplines.
This study’s typology reorients collective service access strategies with reference to the extent of pressure they exert on the local state to improve provision. While the literature provided the framework for the identification of strategies which placed different degrees of pressure on the state, the fieldwork informed the development of the direct–indirect distinction, as well as an illustration of how strategies are combined and sequenced to employ increasing pressure over time. The typology outlined in this study thus combines deductive and inductive approaches. The range of existing strategies is deductively synthesised in the typology, but the typology is also inductively informed by primary data collection in Hyderabad.
The range and orientation of collective strategies employed by the BVM
In order to bring about short-term and long-term service enhancements, the BVM platform employed a range of moderate- and high-pressure strategies to engage with the local state in Hyderabad. Table 1 conceptually organises the strategies employed and provides examples of their application.
Collective strategies to enhance urban basic service access.
Moderate pressure: Engaging the state on its own terms
The indirect collective pressure strategies which emerged from the fieldwork, both of which have been identified in the literature on bottom-up strategies discussed above, are service co-production with public agencies, and organised voting in local government elections on the basis of service delivery performance.
Co-production
Both physical and informational co-production take place in the study areas. For instance, a short-term partnership between the HMWSSB and residents improved collective water service access for 200 households in the A-section neighbourhood of Addagutta. While HMWSSB engineers identified a borehole location, supplied a pump and built two water mains, the trenches for the mains were dug by a volunteer group of residents over a period of 10–15 days. The public agency manages the infrastructure on an ongoing basis and charges the standard rate for the service. In short, the community performed tasks in the government’s remit, and received a substantial infrastructure upgrade.
Systematic, public data co-production of water quality testing has also occurred more concertedly (from 2010 to 2016). Following the Bholakpur contamination incident, a group of resident volunteers began testing water quality weekly with chlorine kits and the support provided by the Citizens First programme. Over time, they shared their results with the HMWSSB, and the agency acknowledged that community testing was accurate and superior to its own efforts. Consistent co-production lasted for several years before the agency took on responsibility for testing and maintaining a designated unit for quality complaints lodged by BVM groups.
Local voting
There is conflicting evidence on the extent to which Indian urbanites use their local votes to enhance basic service access (Munshi and Rosenzweig, 2008). In Hyderabad, marginalised settlement residents vote in official elections at higher rates than the general population, making this mechanism to improve collective service access potentially promising (C Kar, interview 9 July 2014). While some assert that slum votes are cast along communal lines or captured by patrons rather than on the basis of service delivery performance (Gupta, 2004; J Jairath, interview 15 August 2013), baseline survey data of residents in the three main study areas shows that nearly two-thirds of residents voted locally at least in part on the basis of water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) conditions (Pierce, 2017a). In the 2014 Lok Sabha election, local BVM units also reported successfully lobbying politicians to incorporate WASH into their policy agendas in order to gain re-election. This success was partly based on a training session held with both an NGO operating in the slum, the Association for Promoting Social Action, and the government’s Election Watch commission, to ensure that residents’ votes in state and national elections were not sold to political parties. The ability of BVM groups to hold politicians accountable for their service enhancement promises post-election, however, remains unproven.
High pressure: Changing incentives or norms
In cases where the local government is unwilling or unresponsive to indirect attempts to improve service access – such as co-production or voting – a third group of higher-pressure strategies are often employed by resident groups to change or influence incentives and norms of the state. The exact engagement strategies in this category employed by collective groups depend more heavily on local context than no-pressure or low-pressure mechanisms because they require intimate knowledge of the local state. The strategies employed in the study areas, however, expand our understanding of the potential means of effective pressure techniques beyond what is currently explicated in the literature.
Indirect strategies
The Right to Information Act
The 2005 Indian national Right to Information Act (RTIA) enables individuals to request and receive information in writing on any decision or spending from any public agency within 30 days for a cost of only R10 (US$ 0.16). Government agencies can only deny a RTIA request if the information requested affects national security. To date, however, individuals’ ability to raise service delivery concerns via the RTIA has looked better on paper than it has functioned in practice, as a result of long delays, obfuscation and demand for additional funds by government agencies (Times of India, 2014b). Filing RTIA requests can expose the filer to a physical access risk, as evidenced by recent incidents in Telangana state (Times of India, 2014a), but also improve access to welfare services (Peisakhin and Pinto, 2010).
The reported awareness of residents of the RTIA in the settlements was low, and individuals’ ability was also hindered by literacy obstacles. Yet filing RTIA requests was found to be a key strategy employed by the collective organisation of the BVM. Resident groups in each slum attended training on how to file a RTIA petition, and literate BVM members took the lead in drafting claims on behalf of their neighbourhood groups. Across the four slum areas, at least 50 RTIA petitions were filed regarding collective infrastructure maintenance and collective requests for household ration cards and water connections, which they were already supposed to be receiving.
In 30 RTIA petitions filed by the Bholakpur and Rasoolpura BVM groups to various public agencies in the period 2009–2014, the agencies demonstrated a high degree of non-compliance with the guidelines of the act. The average response time was much longer than the maximum of 30 days. Only 10% of RTIA requests received a response within this timeframe, and about half of the time repeated petitions received no reply. In the most blatant attempt to undermine residents’ concerns, the Secunderabad Cantonment Board (SCB) rebuffed multiple RTIA requests filed on behalf of BVM groups in the Anna Nagar neighbourhood of Rasoolpura to receive more information on the location of drinking water service lines, claiming that this information was a matter of national security.
At the same time, the information derived from the requests to which public agencies responded was used by BVM groups to apply higher-pressure, direct tactics to improve service access. In Rasoolpura, information derived from a RTIA filing regarding the SCB’s spatial planning and spending on nalas (open drain) motivated a more direct effort to compel the agency to cover the main drainage channel which bisects the slum. Moreover, the BVM in Bholakpur used RTIA requests to monitor spending from a special fund for water infrastructure managed by the HMWSSB, which was originally sanctioned by the chief minister of Andhra Pradesh following the 2009 water quality provision failure. Precise knowledge of the extent of designated public funds spent enabled BVM groups to pressure agencies to allocate the remainder appropriately.
Media reports
Another indirect but high-pressure method which collectively organised groups employ is the generation of media coverage which reflects poorly on specific bureaucrats, politicians or agencies failing to provide adequate basic service delivery. Indian media outlets do not hesitate to publish reports of public-sector failure or neglect because such reports do not typically elicit reprisals or sanctions, as they do in many other contexts. While some officials or agencies appear immune to criticism, for others a prominent negative media report can materially damage agency reputations and individuals’ career prospects. In terms of incentives, a prominent or virulent press report effectively puts pressure on an official or agency to quickly take action to address a local service access request which may have been previously ignored.
The causal relationship between press coverage on public-sector performance and levels of public service provision has been quantified at the state level within India (Besley and Burgess, 2001). Although local media reporting on service provision is ubiquitous, little if any scholarly work has analysed how residents channel information on basic service disparities to the media, as well as the effect of media reporting on local politicians’ and bureaucrats’ performance (Joshi, 2013). As with RTIA petitions, this strategy is largely employed collectively through BVM groups in the study areas. Media members were much more likely to trust and report a story if it was sourced by a group rather than an individual and affected a larger number of people.
In the slum of Rasoolpura alone, over the period 2010–2014, the BVM informed media outlets of basic service deficiencies which resulted in at least 130 distinct articles in ten different news sources. Outlets ranged from the online Telugu language E-nadu to the Deccan Chronicle, an English daily newspaper read widely throughout central-south India. BVM members in Bholakpur utilised media even more innovatively; they maintained and updated Facebook and Twitter pages almost daily, including many posts chronicling progress or failures on basic service conditions in the slum. According to BVM leadership, the ‘friends’ of the Bholakpur BVM Facebook page include the representative local member of the Indian national assembly and the municipal corporator (M Chand, interview 13 August 2014).
In contrast to the long response time common to filing an RTIA petition, shamed government workers or representatives often arrive in the settlements the day after negative news reports are published, to resolve the service provision issue, or at least placate residents to ensure that the issue is not kept in the public eye (C Kar, interview 9 July 2014). The downside of this strategy, however, is that service enhancements deriving from media pressure tend to be one-off, rather than sustained.
Public demonstrations
In contrast to the use of the media, public demonstrations or dharnas (sit-ins) are often cited by scholars as a strategy for marginalised urban residents to raise their concerns regarding public-sector service delivery (for instance, see Nleya, 2011). Public demonstrations are the most adversarial and precarious means employed to change the incentives of the local state. The government is quickly faced with the choice of ignoring a protest, repressing it or directly placating protesters (see Alexander, 2010). Evidence regarding the efficacy of public demonstrations in relation to service access in urban India is mixed. Kumar (2008) contends that slum dwellers’ public demonstrations regarding services are overshadowed by overtly political protests or demonstrations regarding current events, and thus elicit little response from public officials. On the other hand, Gopakumar (2014) documents how repeated intra-city protests organised by the Karnataka Slum Dwellers Federation regarding water service access concerns in Bangalore elicited quick and positive responses from local and regional politicians.
In Hyderabad, BVM groups usually organise public demonstrations as a last resort after other, less adversarial means of grievance redressal prove ineffective. When initiated, however, demonstrations originated in the study areas by the BVM can mobilise between 500 and 1000 slum residents quickly, as they draw on networks of women’s self-help groups already operating in the settlements. Yet, demonstrations are viewed as a limited means of engaging with the local government in the long term, as they lose effectiveness if employed frequently and may actually reduce service access if those targeted retaliate. Consequently, the threat of a demonstration or dharna is used more often than they are actually staged. For instance, residents of Bholakpur, with support of BVM groups from the other study areas, staged an impromptu dharna at the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) office in August 2014. This protest took place only after a range of positive and negative engagement strategies were employed with the government over several years but has yet to elicit any service improvements by the agency.
On the other hand, after unsuccessful engagement efforts with GHMC officials over a period of two years regarding the illegal occupation of community halls by non-residents associated with local politicians, residents of Addagutta staged a dharna against the land grabs and the appropriation of public buildings. The sit-in brought an immediate halt to this activity.
Direct strategies
Representations
More than RTIA filings, media engagement and protests, collectively organised groups’ first and most central strategy in the study areas is to engage directly with local government agencies to improve collective basic service access. Since the constitutional empowerment of urban local bodies in 1992, a range of initiatives have sprung up across India which aimed to improve the direct engagement of urban residents with local governments for enhanced service access, but have been found to be largely inaccessible by marginalised residents for political (de Wit et al., 2008) or technological (Muralidharan et al., 2014) reasons. Local public agencies often remain unresponsive to claims directly lodged by disadvantaged groups (de Wit and Berner, 2009).
Given the failure of state-instituted direct grievance channels, BVM groups developed a primary documentation procedure to facilitate formal service requests to public agencies. This process of ‘representations’ is more time-consuming and technologically antiquated than highly touted accountability mechanisms but has proven more effective. BVM groups file paper representations with local, state and national government agencies, most notably the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC), the Hyderabad Metropolitan Water Supply and Sewerage Board (HMWSSB) and, in the case of Rasooolpura, the Secunderabad Cantonment Board (SCB). BVM groups made 500 representations to public agencies in the four study settlements over the period of 2010–August 2014. The process starts with the aggregation of collective basic service concerns of residents at regular BVM meetings, in writing. Next, formal requests for service upgrading are filed in person with local government agencies via their self-designated grievance channels, response time and quality are recorded. Often these filings are made multiple times. The strategy of representation requires learning each local agency’s both nominal and operational procedures. The use of acquired knowledge to document lack of response and adherence to agency procedures over time in turn produces more pressure on the agency in the grievance redressal process (as also shown in Hasan, 2008).
For instance, in 2013, the GHMC instituted a weekly meeting called prajavani, during which time officials from all agency offices were required to be present to field resident complaints in person on a ‘first come, first served’ basis. As there is little transparency as to how public officials prioritise one service deficiency over another, the collective nature of the BVM helped to add weight to residents’ claims. BVM groups often also make representations directly to line departments, particularly when an issue remains unaddressed for an extended period. A local BVM unit will file the same representation with a public agency every month for a period of several months before taking a more adversarial approach such as media engagement, public protest or direct legal reprisal. According to local leaders, representations are more successful than pre-BVM attempts to voice service deficiencies with local government agencies and are slowly leading to better and broader service delivery by agencies beyond the scope of representations.
Legal reprisal
Finally, the most direct and aggressive tactic to improve service provision that collectively organised urban residents in democratic contexts can pursue is legal action against negligent public officials. A legally binding judgement can compel local officials – by the legitimacy of the state – to satisfy service provision claims or face a penalty, typically a fine or criminal charge. Obstacles to resident collectives using this tactic include the expertise needed to file and carry out legal claims, as well as pay legal fees. Moreover, despite the nominally neutral status of the judicial system, research from India has shown that legal claims made on behalf of disadvantaged groups for basic service access are often delayed, dismissed arbitrarily or receive adverse judgements in court (J Jairath, interview 15 August 2013).
In Hyderabad, public interest litigation has proven successful in compelling local government agencies to better manage local water resources. The relevance of litigation as a tool available to marginalised settlements, however, is limited given its expense, and it is thus normally reserved for very high-profile cases. By contrast, the Lok Ayukta (translated ‘appointed by the people’) office is an obscure and little-used mechanism which holds more promise for advancing collective service access. Lok Ayukta is an anti-corruption, ombudsman organisation instituted at the state level across India. This institution allows any resident to file a claim against a specific public official for only 180 Rupees (Lok Ayukta, 2010). Only state-level and local officials can be charged, and visual evidence of negligence is needed to successfully pursue a claim.
In 2014, BVM participants in the slums received pro bono training on the process to file a Lok Ayukta claim from a local lawyer. Resident lawyers in both the Bholakpur and Addagutta BVM groups also have the technical capacity to file Lok Ayukta claims. While a Lok Ayukta claim had not been filed by residents to improve service conditions, several communities had threatened to pursue this tactic if issues of service access deficits remained unaddressed. For instance, BVM groups which mobilised around school sanitation deficiencies in Rasoolpura and public toilets deficits in Bholakpur had given local government officials deadlines by which they would file a Lok Ayukta claim. Much as with protests, their ability to rather than the actual carrying out of this strategy incentivised officials to respond and begin to address these issues.
Discussion
The results from this study have several implications for our understanding of bottom-up strategies to effect better service access in marginalised settlements. First, the study deepens an understanding of the necessity of collective rather than individual or household action in these contexts. Grievances regarding basic service deficits in the settlements were taken more seriously by government agencies when claims were made jointly by a critical mass of residents (Ramoji, 2014). There are two explanations for the greater effectiveness of supra-household strategies, one relating to their costs and the other to their benefits. First, basic service improvements are subject to economies of scale. The infrastructure necessary to improve provision is often most cost-effectively supplied to multiple households rather than one. Since it is more efficient for a public agency to improve service to a collective group of households – all else equal – it will be more likely to make such an investment when a collective group advocate for it. Second, basic service provision within the study areas approximates pure public goods provision. Basic service enhancements do not have public goods characteristics at all scales. In fact, differentiation in service provision by the local state to sub-city neighbourhoods helps to explain the presence of slum settlements (Pierce, 2017b). Although basic service provision to settlements is both rivalrous and excludable, however, interviewees indicated that provision within settlements, the scale at which the BVM operates, was relatively non-excludable and non-rivalrous, as detailed in a separate study by the author (Pierce, 2017a). In other words, the benefits or deficits of basic service enhancements were usually experienced collectively, thus motivating multiple neighbouring households to advocate for such improvements jointly.
Second, the study demonstrates the empirical complexity of how multiple strategies are utilised by a single collective platform such as the BVM to advance and expand claims around multiple, simultaneously experienced basic service deficits via a range of ‘actions’. Because service needs have pressing implications for health and livelihoods, the quickest routes to improve basic service access are taken at the same time as longer-term strategies are employed. Moreover, strategy utilisation is sequenced and dynamic rather than static. This study appears unique in its explicit comparison and assessment of both the sequencing and effectiveness of the ‘multitude of strategies’ (Mitlin, 2006) employed by collectively organised groups to overcome multiple service deficiencies.
While studies such as Hasan’s (2008) note the ‘spinoff’ activities which develop from an initially narrow service enhancement focus, the joint nature of service needs in the study areas also extends beyond what has been explicated in the published literature. The BVM platform developed from an initial drinking water quality testing effort as residents found that utilising collective voice was more effective than uncoordinated individual or household efforts to bring about service enhancements. In addition to drinking water and sanitation provision, improved drainage, solid waste management and electricity provision have emerged as core service concerns of the BVM platform, with education, primary health and transportation as secondary concerns. Moreover, slum dwellers’ holistic needs comprise more than enhanced access to basic services (Beard, 2018). Initial NGO implementers of the BVM envisioned that the platform would bring about more than improvements in basic service access, including better livelihoods and a recognition of slum dwellers’ power (J Jairath, interview 15 August 2013). Dissatisfaction with progress on this broader remit led to the creation of the BVM as a platform. Without directly invoking the language of the right to the city, slum residents involved in the BVM eventually embraced a more ambitious agenda than WASH or even broad service enhancements – what Hasan (2008) might call ‘spinoff activities’ – as their ultimate aims for collective action. In the Anna Nagar neighbourhood of Rasoolpura, for instance, residents have taken up emergency transportation services as a concern. In Ambedkar Nagar the BVM spends much of its effort demanding a new public school, and in Bholakpur, women’s concerns regarding domestic abuse became central. It remains to be seen how much success the BVM will have in effecting pressure on the local state for a broader suite of reforms than basic service enhancements.
Some high-pressure strategies outlined in this study may not be feasible in different contexts which allow for less freedom of civil society groups, and hybrid versions of the categories proposed in this typology are sure to emerge at the local level. In the context of settlements such as the Hyderabad study areas, a number of collective strategies have elicited improvements in basic service access, but of different magnitudes and with varying amounts of effort. Given residents’ limited time and resources, prioritisation of strategies is essential. Some strategies require relatively low effort and yield fast but relatively minor basic service enhancements. For instance, response to published media reports often induces a direct response from government agencies or politicians who want to address and quiet concern regarding the publicised issue, but do not persist. Other strategies, such as protests, are carried out only after a period of concerted BVM engagement but little local state response. These strategies are higher risk and yield widely varying results. By contrast, this study finds that the most effective strategies to effect long-term change appear to be those carried out with increasing amounts of pressure in sustained direct engagement, supported by process documentation.
To increase the effective pressure of their efforts on the local state, BVM neighbourhood groups have scaled up their strategies via partnerships and networking with other organisations or initiatives, as other studies have shown to be successful (Appadurai, 2001; Patel et al., 2001). A focus on extensive scaling, before programme design has demonstrated effectiveness or elicited interest from the supposed beneficiaries, is a common mistake made by NGOs and collectively organised groups (Uvin, Jain and Brown, 2000). The first phase of the Citizen First programme exhibited this type of overextension by attempting to spread the programme across 75 slums without sufficient buy-in from residents or evidence of success. The second phase, on the other hand, made intensive efforts to activate the BVM in four slums and has consequently gained the trust and enthusiasm of residents. This divergence in outcomes suggests that programme scaling may be better pursued as a result of demand from local communities rather than unprompted supply from external programme implementers.
Conclusion
This study synthesises and re-orients the disparate strategies proposed in the literature to effect collective basic service enhancements in low-income, urban settlements. Examples from fieldwork conducted in four slum settlements in Hyderabad, India, illustrate how strategies interact. Using these data sources, this study develops a typology which organises short-term service access strategies with respect to the extent of pressure they exert on the state to improve service provision in the longer term.
Using evidence from the settlements, this study argues that high-pressure strategies which directly aim to change the incentives or norms of local public agencies and their officials are the most worthwhile. These tactics best address both short-term service needs and enhancement of the incentive of the public sector to improve service provision in the long term. Strategies such as filing representations build institutional memory among BVM groups, enabling them to increasingly monitor, document and identify successful tactics to address service deficiency issues over time. The steady pressure exerted via direct engagement also gradually alters the incentives of local public-sector officials and agencies to provide longer-term solutions, without requiring time and knowledge-intensive resident group monitoring and lobbying. Steady collective engagement with local public institutions, despite its challenges, thus represents the best opportunity to address practical and strategic basic service needs. Future efforts to enhance collective basic service access across a range of insecure settlement types, whether initiated by local communities, NGOs, or government agencies, can utilise the typology developed in this paper to employ the strategies most relevant to their local contexts.
